Best Short Stories eBook

“I don’t know,” said the bridge-builder,
“whether the engineer has the picture drawed
yet or not, but the bridge is up and the trains is
passin’ over it.”

THE LAST WORD, AS USUAL

The ways of a woman are supposed to be past finding
out, but after all there are times when her logic
is irresistible as in the case of a certain wife who
had spent her husband’s money, had compromised
him more than once, had neglected her children and
her household duties, and had done everything that
woman can do to make his life a failure.

And then, as they were both confronted by the miserable
end of it all, and realized that there was no way
out of it, he said:

“Perhaps I ought not to appear to be too trivially
curious, but I confess to a desire to know why you
have done all this. You must have known, if you
kept on, just what the end would be. Of course,
nobody expects a woman to use her reason. But
didn’t you have, even in a dim way, some idea
of what you were doing?”

She gazed at him with her usual defiance, a habit
not to be broken even by the inevitable.

“Certainly I did. It was your fault.”

“My fault! How do you make that out?”

“Because I have never had the slightest respect
for you.”

“Why not?”

She actually laughed.

“How could you expect me to have any respect
for a man who could not succeed in preventing me from
doing the things I did?”

FRUGAL TO THE END

Not long ago a certain publication had an idea.
Its editor made up a list of thirty men and women
distinguished in art, religion, literature, commerce,
politics, and other lines, and to each he sent a letter
or a telegram containing this question: “If
you had but forty-eight hours more to live, how would
you spend them?” his purpose being to embody
the replies in a symposium in a subsequent issue of
his periodical.

Among those who received copies of the inquiry was
a New York writer. He thought the proposition
over for a spell, and then sent back the truthful
answer by wire, collect:

“One at a time.”

NOT MUCH TO TALK ABOUT

There was an explosion of one of the big guns on a
battleship not long ago. Shortly afterward one
of the sailors who was injured was asked by a reporter
to give an account of it.

“Well, sir,” rejoined the jacky, “it
was like this: You see, I was standin’
with me back to the gun, a-facin’ the port side.
All of a sudden I hears a hell of a noise; then, sir,
the ship physician, he says, ‘Set up an’
take this,’”

FOLLOWING INSTRUCTIONS

YOUTH (with tie of the Stars and Stripes):
I sent you some suggestions telling you how to make
your paper more interesting. Have you carried
out any of my ideas?